wtf mullenweg, you're a and the founder of #wordpress for chrissakes #mildlyinfuriating
(mullenweg claims that the apostrophe we type is the prime mark)
wtf mullenweg, you’re a and the founder of #wordpress for chrissakes
Which is still stupid as a single quote is an apostrophe. Quotation marks of any kind didn’t really exist prior to the creation of the printing press (this is also why there are many many local variants). There were several marks that were used to emphasize or highlight passages, but not to directly mark something as a quotation. When printers found themselves in need of a character they didn’t have they re-used existing characters (since characters were literally hunks of metal and they couldn’t exactly go out and whittle a new one).
For apostrophe they just flipped a , upside down, and thus the apostrophe was born (a similar mark used to denote where something was omitted was used in writing, so the apostrophe did exist prior to that point, but it was written more in the style of a carat above the word typically).
When they needed a way to mark quoted text different printers used different characters. For some they re-used the same trick as they used for apostrophe and just used upside down commas and thus the single quote was born. Others did the same, but in order to differentiate it from the apostrophe they double it up, hence the " character is literally a double upside down apostrophe. Some used either single <> or double << >> brackets to denote quotations. Some use a comma and apostrophe E.G. ,a quote’ or doubled it E.G. ,another quote’’ (N.B. it looks like the comment renderer on here is eating the double , replacing it with a single , and possibly replacing the double ’ with a single " character). It was all down to whatever the local printers had available and felt was appropriate.
Hence getting bent out of shape about if a ’ is an apostrophe or a single quote is utterly stupid, it’s both as they’re literally the same character.
I think technically I made a mistake there, re-watching it, while the left “single quote” character is an inverted comma, the matching right “single quote” is just an apostrophe, but the apostrophe itself isn’t an inverted comma, it’s its own character. I got confused between the left and right single quote.
Ultimately though, the thing with English is that it’s a complete dumpster fire of a language, and literally every rule has nearly as many exceptions as it does cases where it applies. The language didn’t evolve so much as it metastasized in fits and starts. Nearly every feature of the language from its words, to spelling, to grammar was either awkwardly bolted on from some other language, or it was just invented from whole cloth by some random printer or author (often with highly dubious logic driving it). This is just the latest iteration of that process with people inventing distinctions between characters that didn’t really exist in the past. Single quote is already a bit of an aberration, eventually it will likely just die out in actual usage and we’ll be left with this abortive calcified single quote character in the UTF character set to mark where it used to be.
Also on the whole “the king his book” thing, I think the video kind of agrees with you but in an awkward sort of way. He points out that the belief that it’s an abbreviation for “his” was incorrect, but where it gets confusing is that it’s implied that that incorrect belief is why the apostrophe is used as a possessive, rather than as a marker for the elision of the “e” in “es”. The overall impression is that grammatically it would be correct to just leave the apostrophe off and just add s to show possession. The reason I think he brought up the debunked “his” theory was to highlight where that leads to incorrect over correction by some writers where they replace the possessive with an expanded incorrect “his” version.
Which is still stupid as a single quote is an apostrophe. Quotation marks of any kind didn’t really exist prior to the creation of the printing press (this is also why there are many many local variants). There were several marks that were used to emphasize or highlight passages, but not to directly mark something as a quotation. When printers found themselves in need of a character they didn’t have they re-used existing characters (since characters were literally hunks of metal and they couldn’t exactly go out and whittle a new one).
For apostrophe they just flipped a , upside down, and thus the apostrophe was born (a similar mark used to denote where something was omitted was used in writing, so the apostrophe did exist prior to that point, but it was written more in the style of a carat above the word typically).
When they needed a way to mark quoted text different printers used different characters. For some they re-used the same trick as they used for apostrophe and just used upside down commas and thus the single quote was born. Others did the same, but in order to differentiate it from the apostrophe they double it up, hence the " character is literally a double upside down apostrophe. Some used either single <> or double << >> brackets to denote quotations. Some use a comma and apostrophe E.G. ,a quote’ or doubled it E.G. ,another quote’’ (N.B. it looks like the comment renderer on here is eating the double , replacing it with a single , and possibly replacing the double ’ with a single " character). It was all down to whatever the local printers had available and felt was appropriate.
Hence getting bent out of shape about if a ’ is an apostrophe or a single quote is utterly stupid, it’s both as they’re literally the same character.
Look, the title of the sub is “mildly”. I’m as “bent out of shape” by this as I am about “octopi”.
citation needed
No problem, see here.
Interesting. I couldn’t find the claim in the video’s sources, though. He also says that only for quotation marks and not for the apostrophe.
I think technically I made a mistake there, re-watching it, while the left “single quote” character is an inverted comma, the matching right “single quote” is just an apostrophe, but the apostrophe itself isn’t an inverted comma, it’s its own character. I got confused between the left and right single quote.
Also, the thing about “the king his book” is an outdated theory. The possessive is due to an obsolete feature of the English language dropped in evolution that used “-es” as a possessive suffix.
Ultimately though, the thing with English is that it’s a complete dumpster fire of a language, and literally every rule has nearly as many exceptions as it does cases where it applies. The language didn’t evolve so much as it metastasized in fits and starts. Nearly every feature of the language from its words, to spelling, to grammar was either awkwardly bolted on from some other language, or it was just invented from whole cloth by some random printer or author (often with highly dubious logic driving it). This is just the latest iteration of that process with people inventing distinctions between characters that didn’t really exist in the past. Single quote is already a bit of an aberration, eventually it will likely just die out in actual usage and we’ll be left with this abortive calcified single quote character in the UTF character set to mark where it used to be.
Also on the whole “the king his book” thing, I think the video kind of agrees with you but in an awkward sort of way. He points out that the belief that it’s an abbreviation for “his” was incorrect, but where it gets confusing is that it’s implied that that incorrect belief is why the apostrophe is used as a possessive, rather than as a marker for the elision of the “e” in “es”. The overall impression is that grammatically it would be correct to just leave the apostrophe off and just add s to show possession. The reason I think he brought up the debunked “his” theory was to highlight where that leads to incorrect over correction by some writers where they replace the possessive with an expanded incorrect “his” version.